Ian McGillis: The revolution comes home

MONTREAL — For writers, there are all kinds of ways to choose what to do next. Sometimes it’s as much what it isn’t as what it is. When Claire Holden Rothman was casting about for a followup to her 2009 Giller Prize-longlisted novel The Heart Specialist, a historical work set in 19th-century Montreal, she was ready for something different.

“I said to myself, ‘I’ll never again write a novel set so far in the past,’ ” the Montreal writer and translator said last week in her Westmount home. “It was so much work just to get the details right. So this time I wanted something that was more contemporary. And not as long,” she laughed.

The seed for what would become My October (Penguin Canada, 352 pages, $22) was actually planted a few years earlier, when Holden Rothman and her husband saw a short documentary at Excentris. L’Otage, a 2004 film by Carl Leblanc and Luc Cyr, picked up the respective stories of two central figures in the October Crisis of 1970: James Cross, the British diplomat kidnapped by the FLQ, and Jacques Lanctôt, one of his captors. The latter has become a rehabilitated public figure in the intervening years, as a publisher, writer and restaurateur; as for Cross, the film revealed an elderly man still clearly haunted by his 59-day ordeal decades before.

“There was clearly so much (Cross) wasn’t able to tell — partly, no doubt, because he had been told by his employers not to, but partly also because he still just doesn’t want to talk about it,” said Holden Rothman. “It really got me thinking about the whole question of who gets to tell their stories and who doesn’t.”

As was the plan, the novel that eventually sprang from those thoughts required comparatively little research on Holden Rothman’s part, mostly because the 56-year-old’s first-hand memories of 1970 are still fresh.

“I lived in Westmount, so mailboxes were exploding all through my elementary school years,” she recalled. “But I was a kid. You’re immortal when you’re young. I never felt in danger.”

In October 1970 she had just entered Westmount High School, having turned 12 that summer. “I don’t remember any fear,” she said about that time. “I remember, when bomb threats were called in, having to go across the way to the armoury and sit on the floor there until we were cleared to go back. It was free time, it was fun — we’d get to skip math class.”

In the succeeding few years, of course, a more informed and nuanced take on local politics emerged for Holden Rothman. Like so many, she was caught up in the idealistic ferment of the times.

“My very first election was in ’76, and I voted for the PQ,” she said. “Who wouldn’t? It was such a sexy party. They had such good values, they were community-oriented, caring in their politics, they had this incredibly charismatic leader. You understood the dream. And I had seen first-hand some of the things that would make people very angry. I had a job scooping ice cream where francophones weren’t allowed to speak French to francophones. The manager was French, my co-workers were French, but they had to speak English to each other. Yet it never flared.”

All this talk of the ’70s is not to say that My October is a novel about that time in the way that, say, Brian Moore’s The Revolution Script is. Rather, it’s a novel exploring how the implications and reverberations of those 1970 events continue to play out decades later in one family living in St-Henri.

Luc Lévesque is a revered Québécois novelist, hailed as “the voice of his people”; his wife, Hannah, translates his books into English. Theirs looks like a noble grand project, an exemplary demonstration of how cultures can be bridged. But alas, the relationship turns out to be a good illustration of the principle that when something looks too good to be true, it generally proves, indeed, not to be true.

Luc and Hannah, to put it kindly, have hit a rough patch. He appears bent on proving that even cultural icons aren’t immune from mid-life crises, moving out of the family home, having a fling with a much younger woman and getting a serious case of writer’s block. Hannah, for her part, is faced with a sticky question: What’s a translator to do when she doesn’t believe in what she’s translating anymore, especially when the person she’s translating is her life partner? There’s also the matter of her estranged father — a Holocaust survivor and former special prosecutor who played a prominent part in the fates of many players in the 1970 crisis — having just suffered a stroke that has rendered him incapable of speech.

Oh, and then there’s Hugo. Luc and Hannah’s 14-year-old son is going through the usual throes of adolescence, and then some: he has just been caught bringing a handgun into his school. We’ve all heard the old Chekhov directive that if a gun appears at a certain point, it has to go off by a certain point. What Holden Rothman does with that is just one of the many ways she subverts expectations in a book whose dramatic ironies and emotional depths deepen with practically every page.

It’s significant that while My October carries inescapable and constant echoes of October 1970, those echoes aren’t quite followed to the present day. The novel is set in the fall and early winter of 2001, and the choice was not a random one, says Holden Rothman. There’s never a good moment for a student to be found with a gun in his school bag, but to do it immediately post-9/11, and with Columbine still fresh in everyone’s mind, was especially ill-timed on Hugo’s part.

“For Hannah especially, that’s a big part of it,” said Holden Rothman. “She’s thinking, ‘Oh my God, the world is falling apart, there’s violence left and right, and now it’s my kid. What’s happening with him?’ She lets her fears get the best of her to the point where she loses sight of the person right in front of her. I’m really interested in what can happen when that happens.”

The novel’s perspective is divided more or less evenly between Hannah, Luc and Hugo, and readers will no doubt choose their own favourites from among the three.

For this reviewer, the most compelling is Hugo. Age 14 is a ripe time for rebellion even in the most normal circumstances, but for Hugo there’s almost an embarrassment of targets to choose from: the aging revolutionaries who teach at his school, the father whose actions don’t match the high standards set in his books, the mother who has neglected to tell him much about her side of the family.

“Hugo has never been told about a lot of things,” said Holden Rothman. “For him it’s been all about Quebec, Quebec, Quebec. Often kids will go toward the stories that haven’t been told. And that can make adults very uncomfortable.”

Some will probably be tempted to read My October as an extended allegory, with each of the main figures representing a particular Quebec point of view. And it does work that way, if that’s what you’re looking for. But the key to its strength is that it needn’t be read that way at all.

“What I’m really interested in is very particular human lives,” Holden Rothman said. “In this case, those lives are in crisis, and even though it’s a crisis with some specific roots, I think that anyone can relate to them. I want that level of reality in the work. I live in Quebec, so it made sense to set it here. If some kind of symbolism crept in, consciously or unconsciously, so be it.”

Helping to ground My October further still as a book about flesh-and-blood people is the explicit homage Holden Rothman pays to another Montreal novel, also set in the streets of St-Henri, one read by generations of Canadian high school students: Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute.

“I love it when a writer inhabits a place,” said Holden Rothman, “and Roy was a very geographical writer. Whenever I walk through that area, I think of her. The places she wrote about in that book are still there. It hasn’t dated. You can walk around there and feel like you have her by your side.”

With any luck at all, people will soon be doing the same with My October.

My October has two local launches next week: Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Eleanor London Côte St-Luc Public Library, 5851 Cavendish Blvd., 514-485-6900, and Thursday at 7 p.m. at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly, 211 Bernard St. W., 514-279-2224. For more information, visit claireholdenrothman.com.

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